Thursday, January 10, 2013

Genesis 26 - 28

At the end of chapter 25 of Genesis we see displayed the character of Isaac's two sons Esau and Jacob. Esau sells his birthright to Jacob for some food. Esau did not have the foresight to look beyond his hunger at the present moment to the inheritance that would belong to the first born, he did not value it. The last verse in chapter 25 states that Esau despised his birthright. Jacob, although God had told Rebekah that Esau the firstborn would serve Jacob, Jacob went about it using deception.
Just as God had made promises to Abraham, He mades promises to Isaac as well. God commands Isaac to stay ion the land and not go to Egypt, because there was a famine in the land. God tells Isaac that He will give the land to his offspring just as He had promised Abraham. God tells him He will multiply his offspring and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. God makes it clear in verse 5 of chapter 26 that Abraham obeyed God's voice and kept His charge, His commandments, His statues and His law. Obedience was a requirement for Adam and Eve, for Noah, for Abraham and now for Isaac as well. We know from the whole of Scripture that it is charge for all God's people. God demands obedience. We can gauge our Christian walk by our obedience to God. That is the bottom line. When God places His Spirit in us, and we are enlightened to the truth of our sinful condition and the horror of the consequences our sin demands from God's hand, we flee to Christ. The Law of God reveals our true condition before God. That is one of the biggest tragedies of the easy believism of the modern gospel, where the consequences of sin and that God's judgment and wrath will not change or alter, when the Law of God is not preached and only the good news is preached, you gain people who claim salvation but who do not understand what they are saved from nor what they are saved into. It is important that we get it right. I know that I talk about this a lot, the reason I do is because I see that it will be people who think they are saved because they have trusted in a easy beleivism- easy salvation Christianity that just does not save, nor can it save. I do it because I want us to be those in Revelation 19: 1-10 who are rejoicing in heaven at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, and not those of Matthew 25:31-46 where the goats are separated from the sheep, the goats thinking they were sheep.

I trust that all who read this take heed to their own soul before God and have been brought to true Light in the Gracious Son of God, our Savior Jesus Christ!!

The story moves rapidly with Isaac for in chapter 27 he is old and death is drawing near so he calls his oldest son Esau to bless him as the firstborn, but Rebekah hers him and since Jacob is her favorite son she entices Jacob into a plot to fool Isaac into blessing Jacob instead of Esau. The plot works and Jacob receives the blessing of Isaac. When Esau learns of this, it is the last draw, Jacob has conned him for the last time and he purposes to kill Jacob. But out of respect for his father Isaac, he will wait until he dies before he kills his brother Jacob. Rebekah learns of Esau's plans and tell Isaac that Jacob should not take a wife from the Hittite women but go to the land of her brother and take a wife, Isaac agrees and Jacob is sent to Laban, Rebekah's brother. We also sees that Esau's in seeing all these things happening, and knowing that Isaac does not want Jacob to take a wife from the Canaanite, marries a Ishmaelite woman.

In chapter 28 as Jacob has left Beersheba and traveling toward Haran he rested and went to sleep and he has a dream and sees a ladder set on the earth and ascended to heaven and he sees the angels of God ascending and descending on it! And The LORD stood above it ( or the LORD stood beside him - then God came down the ladder and was standing over a sleeping Jacob) (1)  and He said " I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring...for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." Jacob when he awakes the next morning is excited and makes an altar and called the place Bethel. Jacob also makes a vow to God - saying that if God will be with me. This is quite different from Abraham's response to God's appearing to him. Jacob we see has a way to go.

Many look at the people that God uses and question His selection. Jacob is a con-man, so how can God use him. When we think like that, we need to remind ourselves what are we, really and yet God has chosen us for salvation, to be a witness for Him. Who is God going to chose, many think they are good people, but that is a prespective that is not sound or biblical. I am not saying that people cannot do good things, we all can do what we consider good, but we all do what God describes as sin, we just don't look at it the same way that God does. God has chosen us for salvation and that is the greatest wonder of all. We have a hard time believing that we all deserve to go to hell. We believe that all we have to do to go to heaven is to die, it does not matter about our sins. God is a good God He will not send anyone to hell. Only God can break through that deception. Only the Spirit of God can break through the deception that can easily cloud our minds each day, and unless you are a Christian and the Holy Spirit is working the graces of God in you, you are deceived. Dont misunderstand me, Christian can have doubts, just as Jesus Christ when He came to earth and lived as a man, he was subject to hunger, thirst, pain. So we who have the Holy Spirit in us have Him always yet He is not always a roaring fire within us, He sometimes is a flickering flame, yet He is always there. Our exercising of the graces of God have a lot to do with our assurance and doubts. So, the Bible shows God choosing imperfect people because we all are imperfect, we all are sinners, yet God and God alone is able to change our character and form us into someone He can use to be a blessing to others, just as we will see Him transform Jacob the con-man into Israel the man who wrestled with God. Chapter 29 next study.

Blessings!

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